Angel of war

Angel of war, tempera on canvas, 30x40 cm, 2022

This was one of the first paintings I created after arriving in Hamburg from Ukraine because of the war.At that time, I felt a strange emotional dissonance between the reality we were living through and the way much of Europe perceived it. Many people believed the war would end in a few weeks or a few months. Even we wanted to believe that. We needed to believe it because the alternative felt impossible to emotionally survive.

But it did not end.

And over time I realized that war creates an invisible loneliness.The deepest losses often remain internal, silent, and impossible to fully explain to people who did not live through them themselves.

For me, this painting contains sarcasm and pain at the same time. The angel inside the work is not a heroic or religious figure. It is more like a witness. A silent emotional presence that knows what people truly lost beyond the visible destruction.

Because war is not only destroyed cities or homes.It is the private psychological collapse people carry invisibly inside themselves afterward.

I wanted the floating composition and fragmented emotional forms to feel unstable, almost detached from physical reality, reflecting the experience of living between memory, fear, displacement, and emotional survival. The bright colors create tension against the heaviness of the subject, because sometimes trauma exists hidden beneath surfaces that still appear alive.

For me, this painting became a way to speak about the emotional isolation of loss.About the feeling that only your own inner world truly understands what you survived.

“Nobody sees another person’s wounds completely.”
— inspired by Erich Maria Remarque